


Tongue Tied

by cinnamon_skull



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Awkward Romance, Crush, Fluff, Jason whistles Twisted Nerve, M/M, This is all very exciting stuff people, Tim wears pajamas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-25 11:55:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9819299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinnamon_skull/pseuds/cinnamon_skull
Summary: Tim runs into his crush at the grocery store.It’s 3 a.m., and he’s in love.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For Jaytim Week VDE - Day One Prompt Fill - Crush
> 
> Don't leave me tongue tied  
> Don't wave no goodbye  
> Don't leave me tongue tied  
> Don't

Tim liked the Food Village on the corner of First and Main. It was open 24 hours, so no one gave him funny looks when he went grocery shopping at 4 a.m. in his Wonder Woman pajama bottoms and the puffy green coat he’d purchased from the Salvation Army across the street.

He wouldn’t call himself an insomniac, per se, but he did keep a very strange sleeping schedule. Being Red Robin kind of had that effect.

Tonight — or very early in the morning, depending on how one looked at it — Tim had laced up a pair of beat up Doc Martens and stuffed in the edges of his red flannel pants so the material wouldn’t get soaked dragging through wet snow. When the weather was nicer, he liked to wear the Superman slippers Steph had bought him as a birthday gift.

Food shopping usually didn’t take him very long, anyway. It was just that he always ended up hesitating over the ingredients for some complicated dish or another, no matter how many times he’d learned it was a bad idea to use his oven. Most attempts had left his apartment ceiling blackened from smoke, and that was if he was lucky.

A month ago, he’d gotten the idea in his head that he was going to cook Alfred’s famous spiced vegan lentil soup. Just thinking about it now made his mouth water a little. The obvious warnings had been ignored. He was Red Robin, _goddammit_ , and he was going to make something that didn’t come out of a box.

Of course, at the time, he’d seen nothing wrong with attempting to recreate Alfred’s vegetarian magic at 2 a.m. Everything had gone so smoothly at first, and that really should have been his first red flag. He’d chopped the onions and carrots with excellent precision, gotten the spices together with ease and successfully added the lentils without incident.

It hadn’t looked as neat as Alfred's did when he slid a lid over it to let it simmer, but it was in one piece and he hadn’t cut off any fingers, so he’d been willing to cut himself some slack. After pulling off an oven mitt, he’d promptly fell asleep on the couch without setting a timer. When he woke up, the soup was a smoking lump of black tar and the entire building’s fire alarm system was going off.

It had been late — or very early in the morning, depending on how one looked at it — and snowing, thick wet clumps landing in the hair of his very angry looking neighbors as they filed outside to wait for the fire department.

He was still getting death threats under his door.

Anyway, despite his dismal track record, he always felt the stirring need to try something new. The rest of his shopping requirements were laughable easy — boxed cereal, frozen pizza, peanut butter — things that required minimal preparation. He usually splurged on expensive, imported espresso beans, but no one really embraced caffeine as a legitimate food group quite like Tim.

“Hi, Timothy,” greeted his favorite cashier as he passed. Celeste was a fierce little French woman who always wore her hair pulled back in a tight chignon. Tim knew enough about women’s fashion that Steph would be instantly jealous of Celeste’s look. Though she wore pristine clothes under the green apron and minimal jewelry, she made everything look so effortless — even if she was in her late 60s.

“Celeste.” Tim nodded his head at her as he passed. “Make anyone cry today?”

“Not yet,” she said with a wistful grin. “But my shifts not over for another three hours.”

“That’s my girl,” Tim smiled. “See you later.”

Tim had learned the hard way that Celeste was a bigger badass than Batman when he offered to walk her to her car one night.

“Oh, _s'il te plait_ ,” she’d sneered, giving Tim a steely-eyed once over. “You’re scrawny _derrière_ isn’t saving anyone. Especially in slippers.”

Tim had been too amused at the time to argue. Afterwards, he did some research and watched video footage back at the batcave of Celeste kneeing some creep in the groin.

He was just reading the back of a can of soup when he heard it. Someone a few aisles down, whistling a familiar tune. Tim was sure he’d heard it before, but he couldn’t quite place the eerily cheerful tune.

The overhead fluorescent lights flickered for a moment, pulling Tim’s attention away from the can an up toward the ceiling. He lost focus for a second and then.

Well.

Then Jason Todd rounded the corner at sonic speed, nearly crashing into Tim’s cart and sending the can of soup flying from his hands. It landed with a banging crash, rolling away to the end of the aisle and out of sight. The whistling abruptly stopped, and by now Tim had connected the dots to the Twisted Nerve chiller that Jason had a habit of whistling down dark alleys beneath his Hood.

Jason’s boots skidded to a halt across the clean linoleum to avoid a collision at the last moment. A dark look passed over his face before he recognized who was standing in front of him. “Tim?”

“Uhh,” Tim swallowed. “Hi?”

It was unfair, how good Jason looked at this time of night. Whereas Tim had chosen to go with his “poor college student in denial about the real world” outfit, Jason looked like he’d just stepped out of a shoot for Gotham Magazine. He wore a fitted leather jacket over a faded grey t-shirt, paired with tight charcoal jeans and motorcycle boots that had silver embellishments on the heels.

Now was as good a time as any for Tim to remember his embarrassing, debilitating crush on Jason that turned him into a blushing, clumsy, stuttering version of his normal self. He’d managed to avoid Jason for weeks in an attempt to stomp down his growing attraction to the older man. It seemed like distance, however, had done nothing to reel in his desire to leave hickeys along the soft-looking stretch of skin beneath Jason’s ear.

“I didn’t know you shopped here.” Jason’s eyes swept quickly down Tim’s front, only to catch on his flannel pajama pants, and Tim fought back the first of many flushes. “Huh,” Jason said, softly, almost to himself, before bringing his gaze back up to Tim’s face with an expectant look.

“Uhh, yeah.” Tim bent down to pick up the can of soup, before he remembered it had rolled halfway down the aisle. He stood up lamely, his eyes on the ground, and an awkward silence swept between them.

When he looked up, Jason’s eyes were on Tim’s groceries and his full lips were pulled into a frown. “Why do you have so many frozen pizzas in your carriage?”

The scandalized note to his voice made Tim laugh. It surprised him, how easily his earlier tension gave way to strange excitement.

“What’s funny?” Jason asked, a confused tilt to his head.

Tim swept his hand toward the metal shopping cart. “You call it a carriage? It’s a cart, you know?”

“Call it whatever you want, how does one person eat so many chemically-enhanced, cheese-covered slices of cardboard?”

Tim looked at the large stack of boxes taking up most of the space in his car. “Very easily. They’re delicious.”

Jason took Tim’s response as an invitation to rummage through the rest of his groceries. It was hard to be mad when Jason looked so good doing it. 

“Pop Tarts, really? Really, Tim?”

“What?” Tim grabbed the box of chocolate frosted pastries from Jason’s hand. His very good-looking hand, brown and strong. “I like eating them for breakfast. And I know Roy likes them. He eats them when he visits.”

“Roy’s an animal,” Jason scoffed. He pushed past the boxes of Pop Tarts to get a closer look at the rest of the items lining the sides of Tim’s cart. “Oh my god, please tell me you’re not living on peanut butter sandwiches like an eight-year-old.”

“I’m not?” Tim lied.

“I thought you were a healthy eater,” Jason scolded, pulling out cans of soup and stacking them back on the shelves. “These are full of salt, preservatives and BPA.”

“What’s BPA?” Tim pulled a few cans back into his cart when Jason wasn't looking. “I am healthy, I’m a vegetarian.”

“Is that a birthday cake?” Jason cut him off, pulling out a white box Tim had picked up from the bakery. It was white with red and blue frosting.  “Who’s Beverly?”

Tim snagged the cake from Jason’s hands before he could put it on the shelf next to the discarded soup cans. “No one. It was on sale!”

Jason dragged a hand over his face in frustration. “I thought Dick was bad.”

“Oh, and you’re mister healthy?” Tim took a moment to pull Jason’s groceries closer for inspection. His cart looked like it had taken a trip through the Amazon rainforest with all the greenery in it. Apples, lettuce, carrots, cabbage and broccoli lined the bottom in neatly tied plastic bags. Two packs of strawberries and blueberries rested in the upper basket, alongside the largest container of low-fat yogurt Tim had ever seen.

“Yes,” Jason gestured with his hand. “Although, it’s not much of a challenge to be healthier than you.”

“Hmm,” Tim sniffed, taking one more desperate look. _There._ A bottle of Jack Daniel’s Whiskey half-hidden under a pack of whole grain rice. Tim tipped it on it’s side with a finger, making it clank against the cart. “That looks super healthy.”

“That’s just for fun,” Jason shrugged, grinning. “Can’t always be a good boy, right?”

Tim’s brain short-circuited, and he was pretty sure smoke was emanating from his ears. 

“Now, you want some help or what?”

Tim looked at Jason’s easy smile, and it made him feel all kinds of warm. “Okay,” he shrugged, because he didn’t trust himself to say anything else. In reality, he was freaking out. Jason wanted to hang out with him. Jason wanted to go grocery shopping with him. Jason wanted to lean over his shoulder and talk to him about _produce_ and _protein_  like the world's sexiest nutritionist.    

They spent another hour pushing their carts through the store together. Jason gave Tim tips on easy, healthy, things to make that didn’t require too much prep work or cooking. He was a patient, thoughtful teacher and he didn’t make fun of Tim’s stupid questions.

At the end, they both pushed their carts into Celeste’s line.

She gave them both a fierce look as she pushed her glasses up the bridge of her narrow, regal nose. “Boys,” she said in greeting.

“You know Celeste?” Tim asked, raising an eyebrow at Jason.

“Yeah, she’s my —”

“Favorite,” they said at the same time. Jason gave Tim a strange look, his eyes narrowing and his lips parting in surprise.

“I’m flattered,” Celeste drawled, cutting in and drawing their attention back to the counter. “Truly.”

“Is that sarcasm, Celeste?” Jason asked. “You know I hate it when you toy with my emotions.”

“Cute.” Celeste scanned Jason’s items and gave him a knowing look when she got to his bottle of whiskey. “Having a party by yourself again?”

“Ha ha ha,” Jason said dryly, running his fingers through his hair and glancing back at Tim nervously. “There’s no party without you, Celeste. You know that.”

Celeste jerked an elegant thumb behind Jason. “What about him?”

Tim rocked back on his heels. “What about me?”

“You like to party?” Celeste’s face was as stern as ever, her hands moving robotically through the rest of Jason’s groceries. She was nothing if not efficient.

Tim looked at Jason, who shrugged unhelpfully. “Uhh...”

“ _Oui, oui_ , of course you do,” Celeste said, nodding her head and answering the question herself, despite Tim’s hesitance. In truth, he didn’t drink, and he never went to parties, no matter how many times Steph asked.

“You’re a handsome kid,” Celeste continued, looking sly. “I bet Jason would like it if you ... _partied_ with him.”

“Oh,” Tim breathed out, surprised. Jason seemed to like him well-enough, but he didn’t want to scare Jason away with how much the idea secretly pleased him. They were just buying groceries, and tonight Jason had just felt bad for him really, there was no way that he could possibly —

“I would, yeah,” Jason said, abruptly ending Tim’s train of thought. When he turned to face Tim, his lips were twisted up in a crooked grin. “I mean, if you wanted to, uhh, hang out with me.”

Tim smiled shyly. “Yeah. I would. Yes.”

“Finally,” Celeste sighed. “ _Je n’en crois pas mes yeux!_ ”

And that's how Tim nabbed a date with his super hot crush late at night — or very early in the morning, depending on how one looked at it — at the Food Village in Gotham City. 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Quick, silly prompt fill. Celeste's my fucking girl, if you don't agree, I'll see you in the pit.
> 
> The "make anyone cry bit" is, famously, a reference from 10 Things I Hate About You. If you haven't seen that movie, what are you doing with your life? Seriously, watch it now. 
> 
> Also, you can't tell me that Jason doesn't whistle Twisted Nerve while walking down dark alleys. The Omar Little of Gotham, truly.


End file.
